Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Basics of Internet Marketing

Internet Marketing is a mixture of many different offline strategies and techniques. And the best of these are the ones which have survived and will actually earn you money.

Mailing lists, for example, come from bulk-mailers, who have used these successfully for years. The CAN-SPAM act has put in the rules on this area, enabling honest mailers to make a good living provided they stick by the rules.

But just because it’s being done on the Internet, it doesn’t mean that it’s illegal or “cowboy” or anything else. The basics of business offline are also the basics of business online.

So we are covering, briefly, what you have to know in this area to succeed.

One of the key points is that you treat what you are doing on the Internet as a business. Means you have a schedule, means you have a budget, means you keep track of expenses, means you do all the usual things a business does. And in that way, you actually succeed at this.

The government even gives you tax breaks for this. But the key reason they take away business tax breaks is that the person is using it as a hobby, not a business. The businessperson is constantly looking for ways to improve increase his income. The hobbyist is generally looking for a distraction from life, an entertainment venue.

The rest of us are treating this time off from our day job as a way to make a better income than our day job could ever produce.

Robert Allen laid out the simplicities of Internet Marketing success:

"The most important marketing advice you can ever receive is as follows:

"Find the right audience.

"Ask people what they want.

"Give it to them."

Marketing: The Relationship

Marketing, as has been said, is a relationship. It is all about carrying on a conversation with your buying (and soon-to-be-buying) public.

This conversation isn't any one-shot deal. The real profits of any business aren't made on the first sale. You want to build up a lasting relationship with the customer. You anticipate their wants and desires, deliver a quality product, and then ideally repeat the process every two or three months.

This is different from the "silos" which the larger businesses (Microsoft, IBM among others) build so that the customer is locked into their particular product line. Henry Ford thought this way when he would only produce black cars and trucks, even though people wanted colors. He thought he owned the industry and could dictate to the buying public. Both Microsoft and IBM have learned otherwise, though they still hold large "market shares" of their perceived "customer base".

Those quotes are because those ideas are very old school. As Doc Searls pointed out in the ClueTrain Manifesto, there is a new wave coming. It is the niche wave.

You only retain your buying public to the exact degree you fulfill their wants and needs with your particular solution. Once you have failed to fill those needs, you're replaced by a better product. That's the way it is.

And that's why you have unique, original products and services. You have to stay unique to your niche and best in that niche. The easiest way to do this is to do something you really love, something that you could do forever, something that provides you with constant challenge. You need to be able to grow through the product-line you create.

This keeps you unique, keeps the data coming from you unique - something your customers can't get anywhere else. And you have to keep delivering. Shakespeare, Louis L’amour, Jack London, Stephen King - these mastered their particular genre and kept producing high-quality work routinely. Something they alone could deliver.

If you don't love what you do, do something else. Success is not about money, it's about time, freedom, and choice. You provide service that people want and you get your success by accomplishing your goals. As you achieve your success, as you deliver your service, the money will come in. That's the way it work out.

Earl Nightingale said it best in his Gold recording, "The Strangest Secret":

"Your success will always be measured by the quality and quantity of service you render. Most people will tell you that they want to make money, without understanding this law. The only people who make money work in a mint.

"The rest of us must earn money. This is what causes those who keep looking for something for nothing, or a free ride, to fail in life. Success is not the result of making money; earning money is the result of success - and success is in direct proportion to our service.

"Most people have this law backwards. It's like the man who stands in front of the stove and says to it:"Give me heat and then I'll add the wood." How many men and women do you know, or do you suppose there are today, who take the same attitude toward life? There are millions.

"We've got to put the fuel in before we can expect heat. Likewise, we've got to be of service first before we can expect money. Don't concern yourself with the money. Be of service ... build ... work ... dream ... create!

"Do this and you'll find there is no limit to the prosperity and abundance that will come to you."

The point about money

Money only represents the value of the exchange. What service have you been providing to the community around you?

Being rich is being able to

1) Make more than you spend,

2) Keep what you make.

Real wealth is to be able to reinvest your earnings to provide more service. Money is an energy flow - you manage this flow, not stop it. So excess income you have should be re-invested to provide more services, which in turn will provide more income (provided you manage these profitably).

Let's look at this scene from a very pragmatic approach. You are trying to make yourself a millionaire (or several times over). There is a lot of money around out there. More is being created every day than people actually use up (that's what really causes inflation). Beyond that, there is a great deal of this changing hands all the time, every second you breathe.

What you are trying to do is simply create an income flow (or set of flows) which bring you a pool of money which you can use to help people solve their problems better. Sounds altruistic, doesn't it?

Money isn't a lump sum of stuff that just sits in the bank and gets bigger.

You earn money by providing service that people want. The more they want it, the more valuable it is, the more you can earn.

What we aren't saying here is "making money" or "getting paid". For this isn't work as you have ever known it.

You are doing what you've always really wanted to do, what you "have been put here for". And that's how you earn the money, the millions you've been wanting.

There's no problem with you having a lot of money - as long as you know what you are going to do with it. Exactly what you are going to do with it. Because a sack of money is really just a sack full of paper. But money invested so that it will generate enough to send 100 kids through college - now that is a valuable use of money. When some celebrity spends money in Africa to build a school because she could do more with money there than in America - that's a valuable use of money. Sending billions over to medical research instead of to your kids - that's a valuable use of money.

Andrew Carnegie (and others) made a deal with God - help him get rich in the first half of his life and he would spend the rest in giving it away. And he is known for setting up libraries across the US in small towns and big.

Why did John D. Rockefeller and Bill Gates both get into full-time "giving it away" mode after they made it rich big-time? Because they had nothing really valuable left to do.

And that's the point of all this. You aren't on this planet to "get rich" or anything else. You are here, more or less, to help everyone around you improve their lives and to live better ones. How you do that is up to you. Whether you accept this or not is also up to you.

But I can tell you that the road to getting rich is paved with good actions, not just intentions.

So go out and get all the money you can - right now, today, this moment. And know what you are doing it for, what you are going to do with it.